


Come On Up To The House

by tweedymcgee



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bickering, Bromance to Romance, Horns, Humor, M/M, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 11:37:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3894940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedymcgee/pseuds/tweedymcgee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>He pauses for breath, clenching his hands into fists, and it occurs to you that the one word that hasn’t been unleashed in the godawful torrent of semantically bereft word garbage coming out of his mouth is</em> stop.</p>
<p>Dave Strider has never mastered the First Law of Holes: When in one, stop digging.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You look up from your cozy berth on the sofa when Vantas comes in, spot the DVD case in his hand, and before he even opens his atrocious mouth to gargle out some convoluted profanity-laden ultimatum, you go for the preemptive strike.

no way dude

wild americas on

FUCK YOU SO VERY MUCH, STRIDER. I CAME IN HERE TO PUT MY FROND NUBS UP AFTER A LONG NIGHT OF ENDURING A LOT OF DEMORALIZING VERBAL BEATDOWNS FROM AN ABSOLUTELY HUMUNGOUS BITCH. SO HELP ME I AM GOING TO EAT SOME COOL RANCH GRUBLOAF AND WATCH FAILURE TO LAUNCH, IF I HAVE TO CLAW THE LOOKSTUBS OUT OF AN ARMY OF GOD TIER TIME FUCKERS TO DO IT.

yeah thats a valid argument

except

nuh uh

You deploy strife specibus: capekind and smother his noisy face with a wad of stretchy red god-pajama stuff, sending him careening into the sofa. He gets kind of tangled up in it — that never fails to be entertaining as all hell — and capsizes dramatically into your shoulder.

MMHHHMMMMMPPPHHHHHGGGET THE FUCK OFF ME.

He flails at your cape and kicks you in the thigh. You give him a shove and let him go, sitting up straight, because things are suddenly getting dramatic on Wild America; this coyote is stalking a tiny bitty little baby antelope, and Marty Stouffer is narrating it with characteristically folksy brio. “Run, little fawn,” Marty drawls, with feeling. “The coyote was born to kill. You’re just a baby, but you were born to run.”

WHAT IS THIS, SOME KIND OF FUCKING SPROINGBEAST DOCUMENTARY?

shut up thats exactly what it is

why do you hate everything pure and beautiful and good in this world

marty stouffer is the fucking man

THIS IS SPECTACULARLY CORNY.

yeah thats whats fucking awesome about it obviously

You boot him unceremoniously off the sofa. He hurls himself down on the floor in front of you, a resentful pile of knees and elbows. It’s not like you’re actually mad at him — besides, you won — so you stretch out your two hands, palms down, and start making circles on the tips of his horns like he’s a pair of turntables, with a few beatbox riffs added for emphasis. Brohood, as you have been tutored in it from infancy, is a subtle dance with many gestures and few words. You’ve got to deploy this kind of pacificatory paljitsu every now and then, just to keep things on the level. Gotta keep walking that fine line between gratuitously brutal ass-kicking and the legendary homo zone.

Which is fine in theory, except he immediately goes all still and quiet and everything is suddenly horrendously awkward.

You realize a little too late that in over two years of life in close quarters with these assholes, you’ve seen mawkish troll conciliatory papfests, troll fistfights rolling end over end and toppling the furniture, sloppy troll hatemakeouts with claws and blood and terrible rattling sounds, but you’ve never seen one troll touch another’s horns.

In the long quiet moment that passes next, you can hear the peculiar vibratory silence of someone trying desperately not to let on that some obvious thing is a thing. You know you ought to back off and leave it alone, but it’s unbearable, feeling it just hanging heavy in the air like a piñata full of slugs. Take a swing. Make it worse. You wrap a hand around his right horn and press down on the blunt tip with your thumb.

oh my god

i found it

the karkat shut the fuck up button

This promptly unfreezes him, and you feel him collapse a little under your hand as he lets all the air out of his lungs.

OH. RIGHT. IT’S TIME FOR MORE NOOKCHAFING ADVENTURES IN WATCHING DAVE STRIDER BLUNDER AROUND IN THE WRECKAGE OF MY THOROUGHLY VIOLATED ETHNIC TABOOS LIKE A THRESHING MACHINE STUCK IN A RESPITEBLOCK. IT IS A FUCKING MIRACLE YOU MANAGE TO KEEP YOUR BASIC, RECKLESS ORGAN HULL INTACT ON THIS SHITHIVE FULL OF MURDERTOOLS. YOU SHOULD BE THANKING ALL YOUR CUSTARD-FLESHED HUMAN GODS THAT WE ALL HAVE THE DECENCY NOT TO SLAY YOU DAILY FOR THE OBLIVIOUS SHIT YOU PULL, WHICH WOULD BE GUARAN-FUCKING-TEED TO GET YOU A SICKLE TO THE INHALATION CYLINDER ON MY HOME WORLD. CULTURAL EXCHANGE IS FUCKING MAGICAL.

He pauses for breath, clenching his hands into fists, and it occurs to you that the one word that hasn’t been unleashed in the godawful torrent of semantically bereft word garbage coming out of his mouth is _stop_.

aw man

fuck

its not working

what about this one

You reach out and grasp the other horn as well, rubbing it with your thumb in a sort of exploratory way. He sucks in his breath sharply and goes quiet again.

It’s such a smooth transfer, this effortless flow of voltage from the movement of your hands into nerve and muscle and breath, and some newly awakened executive function in the vicinity of your solar plexus calmly informs you that you’re going to roll with this for as long as he lets you.

bro the headgear is pretty sweet

i mean seriously look at these rad fuckin candy colored hat proppers

man these would look dope as shit atop the striderdome

maybe i should alchemize a set out of like fingernails and vinyl

WOW. THAT HAS GOT TO BE THE FIRST TIME IN MY BRIEF AND TAWDRY EXISTENCE THAT ANYONE HAS EVER EXPRESSED ANYTHING LIKE ENVY FOR THESE STUBBY LITTLE BEHEMOTH LEAVINGS. IN CASE YOU MISSED THE MEMO THEY’RE SORT OF PATHETIC.

dude youve been reading too much troll cosmo

obviously theyre awesome

You lean forward a little on the sofa, find a better angle. “All this frisking and romping strengthens the fawn’s muscles,” says Marty Stouffer, that hokey embarrassing beautiful bastard. You begin to notice your own breath. Karkat doesn’t move, but his stillness is beginning to take on an anticipatory quality.

There’s a seismic shift underway in the genre of the whole interaction, and the longer it goes on without either of you flinching, the more your body is getting subducted under this tectonic plate of limbic inevitability, melting your nerves and turning your guts to magma.

RIGHT. SO FUCKING MAJESTIC. I AM SUCH AN OBVIOUS BORN LEADER OF TROLLS WITH THESE LOFTY BRANCHING SPIRES OF CHITINOUS GLORY.

youve got a point there

ive said it to myself a billion times

you know what would make that vantas kid hella authoritative is if he had a goddamn chandelier on his head

i can see it now

so beautiful

oh my jesus dave who is this leaderly motherfucker with the fractal head shrub

look its thidwick the hollering douche

everybody salute

LOOK, I KNOW IT’S DUMB, OKAY? FUCK YOU.

YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A HEAVING BULGESACK ABOUT IT, JUST BECAUSE YOUR HUMAN “CULTURE” ISN’T A BOILING RIVER OF NEVERENDING MINDFUCK THAT LEAVES YOUR SELF-WORTH INEXTRICABLY BOUND UP WITH THE ARBITRARY SIZE OF A RANDOM PIECE OF YOUR ANATOMY.

He shifts his position on the floor, picking with intense determination at a frayed spot on the carpet in a transparent effort to distract you from the fact that he’s now pressing back into your hands. He shifts his head this way and that, never losing contact, while you run your thumbs in slow oscillations over the whorls of braille where horn meets skullplate and listen to him try not to breathe.

yeah okay back the truck up there troll freud

you lost me with your incomprehensible space dicks on your head problem

thats just too much heavy psychological shit for my weaksauce human brain to comprehend

i mean all these alien concepts are mad confusing yo

You press the heels of your hands into the base of his horns, and begin running the sides of your hands in a curving arc around them from back to front, front to back again. You go lightly at first, but the harder you press down, the more the ridged chitin begins to heat up under your skin, and you settle into a nice smooth Marvin Gaye kind of rhythm. He makes a tiny, choked-off sound and leans back against your knees. It’s not clear to you exactly what kind of signal is being transmitted down these blunt aerials, but friction is obviously a critical part of it.

It’s not like “dicks” was a thing you actually said or anything. What the _fuck_. Sometimes you would love to just nuke yourself from orbit. Complete the analogy: YOUR BRO’S JUNK is to GRATUITOUS TOUCHING as DIGNITY EVERYWHERE is to THE IDIOT NOISES THAT COME OUT OF YOUR FACE.

Well. Maybe the subtleties of your latest blooper reel will be lost on him. Thanks to you, this kid’s set of propositional attitudes concerning the Earth human trouser payload includes gems of versimilitude such as “the traditional symbol of hospitality, used in heraldic coats of arms and brewpub signage” and “emits light to attract prey.”

Who are you kidding. You’re about to dig this hole deeper, aren’t you.

also

think about it

if youve got a real big manly set of head tackle

you cant do this

A familiar inner voice with a cadence of violets whispers something devastating to you about _hanging_ and _sheep_ , and you bend over his tousled head and take one horn entirely into your mouth.

You’re rewarded with a set of pointed claws closing reflexively around your ankle, and a long shuddering breath audible enough to hear over the broad vowels of Marty waxing poetic about the battle of rut in the golden grass of a Colorado autumn. You are the almighty goddamn conductor of a wheezing janky one-man symphony of need called Karkat Vantas, and the power to make him twitch is going straight to your head.

You try not to think about Terezi — grinning, two fingers hooked in your waistband, leaning in close to flick her tongue over your ear. How she stood, that one time it felt like it mattered, in the half-light of the access tunnel with her head cocked, listening for the dull clang of the ventilation shaft and the blood moving through your veins. How she laughed like a drawer full of cutlery. How the one thing you were never allowed to do was touch her.

He’s trembling now. Hell, so are you. You passed the last exit for Kansas City twenty miles ago. The sound of your breath and the click of your teeth on him is driving some kind of insatiable self-amplifying feedback loop inside you. You flick your tongue against the base of his horn, snake your hand down the back of his shirt, and do everything in your limited power not to moan. His back is warm and soft and knobbly in some of the wrong places. He’s a foreign creature put together out of bat wings and beetle husks, and you don’t know how to touch him, and you can’t stop doing it anyway.

It’s too much. It’s not enough. You lean your forehead against the back of his head. You give up, you give up, you give up.

are we just gonna pretend forever like enjoying this isnt a thing were doing

i dunno about you vantas but ive kinda had it up to my noise saucers with those kinds of shenanigans

DAVE I.

JUST.

He heaves a deep sigh, turns around to face you, and grabs your face in two appallingly strong hands — right, brilliant, just in case you forgot, the uncoordinated little mutant you’re casually snogging comes equipped with that freaky troll arm leverage, and a dental arsenal that could probably slice right through your tender human flesh-guts like a hot knife through butter. He looks straight at you, and, oh, shit, no reflective deadpan UV coating is going to spare you from those wide bright eyes.

I GUESS WE’RE DOING THIS?

OH GOD WHAT DO YOU EVEN.

HOW DO YOU.

I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF YOU.

FUCK.

OKAY.

*HHHHHRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.*

WE HAVE TO FUCKING *GO* SOMEWHERE, OKAY, MAYBE, IF IT ISN’T TOO MUCH TO ASK, LIKE MAYBE SOMEWHERE THAT ISN’T CENTER FUCKING STAGE FOR TONIGHT’S AWARD WINNING PERFORMANCE OF “LET’S ALL WATCH KARKAT ‘GOOD DECISIONS’ VANTAS INEPTLY LOSE HIS FLUSHED DANGLE FRUIT TO WHATEVER ELDRITCH HORROR LIES CONCEALED WITHIN THE MULTIVERSE’S SMUGGEST PAIR OF ASSHOLE PAJAMAS.”

That’s a lot of information to process. Especially with all these claws in your hair, holy mother of god does that feel good. You swallow hard.

i

uh

wow

so

take me to your leader i guess


	2. Epilogue

thats it

you broke me

its over

just bury me in a pile of shitty hentai and write “here lies the wreck of the u s s stein“ on my tombstone

im never gonna be able to look a squid in the eye again

im a broken man vantas

this is it this is whats left of my once mighty civilization

just sappho mcdictionary and this weird strider guy whacking it to jacques cousteau

ALL THESE CULTURAL REFERENCES ARE SAILING RIGHT OVER MY SPONGE VESICLE, AND YET I GET THE DISTINCT IMPRESSION THAT EVERY SINGLE FUCKING ONE OF THEM IS HAPPENING AT MY EXPENSE.

settle down cthulhu

WHAT.

sshhh only dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Self-indulgent title is self-indulgent. There's a very special place in my heart for the ancient traditional human game of Gay Chicken.
> 
>   _There's no light in the tunnel_  
>  _No irons in the fire_  
>  _Come on up to the house_  
>  _And you're singing lead soprano_  
>  _In a junkman's choir_  
>  _You gotta come on up to the house_
> 
>   _Doesn't life seem nasty, brutish and short_  
>  _Come on up to the house_  
>  _The seas are stormy_  
>  _And you can't find no port_  
>  _Come on up to the house_
> 
>  
> 
> \--Tom Waits


End file.
